Using the FAQ page at rsync, using tips on the commandline with --exclude= having spaces in the file-spec pattern for --exclude, seem to be ignored by --exclude-from inside the exclude file. I used all types of space escaping techniques: questionmark, single \, the triple \\\, combinations of single & double quoting. the only way I can get the path to exclude is to cut it off at the first instance of space with a *, however this may cut off similarly named directories. This needs to be fixed.
This works fine. There is no need for any escaping inside an exclude-from file since spaces have no special meaning (apart from the plus/minus prefixes that are separated by a single space).